Commentary: Opportunities exist to fill gaps, create jobs

Immigrants can always go to Canada, Australia, or any other countries that welcome them, and build lives there. With declining GDP and high unemployment, we need immigrants to grow our economy, right here, right now.

That’s because the educational backgrounds of immigrants and native-born Americans are different. Statistically, the average skills of native-born American workers are distributed in a bell-shaped curve. Many Americans have high school diplomas and some college education, but relatively few adults lack high school diplomas and even fewer have Ph.D.s in math and science. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1

In contrast, immigrants’ skills are distributed in a U-shaped curve, with disproportionate shares of adults without high school diplomas who seek manual work and others with Ph.D.s in math and science.

Among native-born Americans, 91% have a high school diploma or higher, whereas only 62% of noncitizens do.

Foreign-born workers are about 16% of the labor force, according to the Labor Department, yet represent 49% of the labor force without a high school diploma, 25% of all doctorates, and 35% of doctorates in science, math, computer science and engineering.

Since immigrants have a smaller share of high school diplomas and B.A.s, which is where native workers tend to be concentrated, they do not compete directly with most native-born workers.

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Although immigrants will be substitutes for some primarily low-skilled workers, many of whom are immigrants too, the negative effect on such workers is much smaller than the positive effect for everyone else. The economy as a whole gains, with substantially more winners than losers. In our society, this makes it possible for the winners to compensate those who lose from immigration, and still come out ahead.

Immigrants choose different jobs from native-born Americans. Low-skilled immigrants are disproportionately represented in the service, construction, and agricultural sectors, with occupations such as janitors, landscapers, tailors, plasterers, stucco masons, and farmworkers.

They come to be fruit pickers, as well as janitors and housekeepers, jobs native-born Americans typically do not choose as careers. However, immigrants are not found as crossing guards and funeral service workers, low-skill jobs preferred by Americans. Government, education, health, and social services, are sectors that employ few immigrants.

Almost 8% of immigrants work in food service, compared with 5% of native-born workers. Almost 9% of immigrants are employed in building, grounds keeping, and maintenance, but only 3% of native-born Americans are.

Among professionals, foreign-born workers are employed in computer and mathematical occupations at a higher rate than native-born workers, 3.5% versus 2.4%. Native-born workers are more than three times as likely as immigrants to be employed in legal occupations, 1.4% compared with 0.4%. Workers born in America are much more likely to work in education, training, and library occupations than foreign-born workers, 6.6% versus 3.7%. (See Bureau of Labor Statistics data on employment of native-born and foreign-born workers.)

Nearly a quarter of native-born workers are employed in sales and office occupations, compared with 17% of immigrants. Among immigrants, 13% are employed in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations, whereas only 8% of native-born workers belong to this category. (See Figure 2)

Figure 2

One way to understand the benefits of immigration for native-born Americans is to examine the role of foreigners in start-ups. Start-ups lead to economic growth, and immigrants found new companies in America at greater rates than do the native-born. Examples include Sergey Brin’s Google, Andrew Grove’s Intel; Jerry Yang’s Yahoo; Pierre Omidyar’s eBay; and Elon Musk’s PayPal and SpaceX, to name a few. Alexander Graham Bell, Levi Strauss, Adolph Coors, and Henry Heinz were all immigrants who founded profitable new American businesses.

The share of immigrant-founded Silicon Valley companies has declined from 52% between 1995 and 2005 to 44% between 2006 and 2012.

American universities are among the world’s leading research institutions, attracting the top minds, not only those from America but also from many other countries. The National Science Foundation data show that 176,000 foreign graduate students studied science and engineering in American universities in 2010.

In 2009, the most recent data available, the federal government spent more than $63 billion on science and engineering research at American universities and research institutions. This funding helps finance Ph.D. programs, which are heavily populated with foreign students. More than $35 billion of this research spending is through the Department of Health and Human Services. Other funders include the Defense Department, at $6.8 billion, and the Department of Energy, at $7.2 billion.

Many universities rely on graduate students for research assistance and technical expertise. Government research trains graduate students in the latest technologies. Most research does not require security clearances, and little — if any — research is restricted to American students. Because of this, 52% of doctorate recipients in engineering and 40% of graduate students in the physical sciences were foreign-born temporary U.S. residents in 2011.

By making it difficult for high-skill workers to stay in America, Congress is dissipating the value America receives from private and taxpayers’ investments in research.

Immigrants are also prominent in advanced scientific research. Over one-third of U.S. Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine between 1901 and 2012 were foreign-born. If it were easier for foreign-born students and workers to obtain provisional visas to stay and work in America, visas that could transition into green cards later, America would have faster GDP growth and job creation.

Since 1999, the difference between the labor force participation rates of the two groups have been steadily increasing. In 2012, 67.5% of immigrants participated in the labor force, compared to 63.2% of native-born Americans.

Annual immigration from all countries has fallen since its peak of 1.8 million green card recipients in 1991. The flow of immigrants into America in 2011 was less than 1% of the U.S. labor force, down from 1.4% of the labor force in 1991. The number of undocumented workers in the United States has been declining since 2007. (See Figure 4)

Figure 4

Technology Policy Institute fellow Arlene Holen, using Congressional Budget Office methodology, has estimated that if no green card or H-1B visa constraints had existed in the period 2003 to 2007, an additional 182,000 foreign graduates in science and technology fields would have remained in America. Their contribution to GDP would have been $14 billion in 2008, including $2.7 to $3.6 billion in tax payments. Three hundred thousand H-1B visa holders would also have remained in the U.S. labor force, earning $23 billion in 2008 and generating $34 to $47 billion in tax revenue over the next decade. Read Holen’s study here.

The reason immigrants come to America is because they see opportunity — gaps in our economy that they have the skills to fill. We need them here, rather than going to other countries to compete against us.

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